Long Covid impacting more than 1M children: CDC study suggests
17 comments
·February 7, 2025actuallyalys
dmix
It’s also entirely self reported by parents not medical professionals.
thenerdhead
These headlines are accurate to the study and their noted limitations, not necessarily the actual prevalence which is already known to be much higher than this.
i.e. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/153/3/e20230... or https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-funded-stu...
tap-snap-or-nap
I wonder how much of this is related to the attention economy in combination with perhaps lack of sun, healthy diet, fresh air and regular exercise.
roguecoder
If these symptoms were not attributable to covid, we would expect that the symptoms would be present at the same rate in patients who have never had covid, no?
I'm also not sure what the explanation would be for why the symptoms improve over time, if those were the causes.
plutomeetsyou
[flagged]
thenerdhead
Long COVID in kids is real and widespread. It’s not "rare". Far more than 200k are affected. This latest survey aligns with previous data, but it’s likely an undercount(noted by the authors as a limitation) due to reliance on parental reporting. Kids often struggle to articulate symptoms. Pediatric Long COVID has been ignored despite millions suffering debilitating effects.
Note: I work on NIH efforts to cure Long COVID called RECOVER, RECOVER-TLC, and help non-profits dedicated towards viral persistence/immune dysfunction hypotheses.
whimsicalism
i think we need to rethink our strategy for treating long covid, cfs/me, ibs, and related functional diseases
throwaway888abc
(2023) yet published by ABC in 2025 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db479.htm
any one has more update data ?
throwaway888abc
CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.
null
thenerdhead
It's published here. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Another publication this week showed 4% of children developed Long COVID based on EHR data.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
nostrademons
There was a bulk re-dating of all federal government websites to game Google and make it seem like the new administration is doing more than it actually is:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/ice-us-immig...
Likely many mainstream news sources are using LLMs to summarize existing data sources and not actually reading them with a human, so ABC's crawlers pick up the new federal data, it's been re-datestamped to make it seem like it's dated Jan 24 2025, the AI naively reports it as being published last Monday, and then readers assume it's new reporting. Win-win for everyone involved, and completely useless as news.
horacemorace
> Win-Win for everyone involved
The only losers are the 99%
nostrademons
So it goes with many things today.
The headline is a bit misleading, as the 1 million figure refers to children who had ever had Long Covid, and 293,000 were experiencing it at the time of the survey. That doesn't mean it isn't a serious issue, but I believe accuracy is important here.